Under Turkish Rule
Ignorance about the plight of Jews under Turkish rule -- past, including Ottoman Palestine, and present -- is profound. In lieu of serious, critical examination one finds whitewashed apologetics concocted to promote dubious geo-political strategies -- even the morally bankrupt denial of the Armenian genocide, as promoted, shamefully, by public intellectuals and major US Jewish organizations who abet the exploitation of their co-religionist Turkish Jews as dhmmi “lobbyists” for the government of Turkey. These strategies have “succeeded”, perversely, in further isolating Jews, while failing, abysmally, to alter a virulently Antisemitic Turkish religious (i.e., Islamic), and secular culture—the latter perhaps best exemplified by the wildly popular, and most expensive film ever made in Turkey, “Valley of the Wolves” (released February, 2006) which features an American Jewish doctor dismembering Iraqis brutally murdered by American soldiers in order to harvest their organs for Jewish markets. Prime Minister Erdogan not only failed to condemn the film, he justified its production and popularity.
The ruling AK (Adalet ve Kalkınma) Party’s resounding popular electoral victory July 22, 2007 over its closest “secularist” rival parties is further evidence of Turkey’s steady re-Islamization. Indeed this trend dates literally to the first election during which Turkish voters were offered any option other than one party rule under Ataturk’s CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Party) -- in 1950, when Menderes’ Demokrat Party (DP) pursued a successful electoral strategy by pandering to an Islamic “re-awakening.” Upon election, the DP supported religious schools, and a mosque construction initiative; it also allowed Sufi orders to reappear, and many of their followers then actively supported DP candidates in elections. Already by 1952, Bernard Lewis warned, presciently, about the open re-emergence of Islam in Turkey with the 1950 ascent of Menderes’ DP just twelve years after Atatürk’s death.
Ataturk’s regime and the CHP-lead Republican governments of his successors manifested their own discriminatory attitudes towards non-Muslims, generally, including specific outbursts of antisemitic persecution --most notably the Thracian pogroms of July, 1934. But since 1950, both the Turkish press and Islamic literature have steadily increased their output of theological Islamic antisemitism -- founded upon core anti-Jewish motifs in the Koran, hadith, and sira . . . . The steady recrudescence of fundamentalist Islam in Turkey since 1950 -- epitomized by the overwhelming re-election of the AKP -- does not bode well for either the dhimmified vestigial Jewish community of Turkey, or long term relations between Turkey and the Jewish State of Israel.
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